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Tuesday Tool Tip: ifttt

We are planning to offer a re-occurring feature on our blog called Tuesday Tool Tips. While not offered every week, these posts will describe tools that we find most useful or recommended by other trusted bloggers/sites.

Today’s tip is on ifft, which stands for If This, Then That. If you use a number of social media tools, then you often spend too much time in repetitive tasks. For example, you add a post to your blog, you then link to the post with a tweet. ifttt wants to automate as many of those tasks as it can by providing you with snippets of code to accomplish a task without your intervention. It does this by creating channels – that is, web services such as Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, and many more. “Recipes” trigger actions from one channel to another. For example, every time a post goes up on my WordPress blog, add it as a note to Evernote, or send it to Twitter or Facebook. Another recipe might be every time you update your Facebook picture, update the Twitter one as well. ifttt has even created a couple of its own channels for a calendar and weather. So, for example, one recipe sends email whenever the forecast for the next day is for rain. Others send emails when new books or albums hit Amazon’s top 100 list. Other recipes include such actions as add photos from Flickr or Instagram to a Dropbox folder. As of this date, there are 48 channels available.

ifttt used well can save you time. Used poorly, it can add more time wasters to your email or other media. It is all in how you use the tool.

This kind of tool is so new that there is no name for the category. I’ve considered web service synchronization tools and web services interoperability, then settled on integrative services. Let me know in the comments if you have a better name.